Green Room

Gawker Wants Us to ‘Sympathize’ with Pedophiles

Cord Jefferson’s September 7 column on Gawker should churn your stomach. He wrote about how some consider pedophilia a sexual orientation and how it deserves public sympathy. The first sentence stopped me cold – “it’s not easy to listen to Terry talk about the time he had sex with a seven-year-old girl.”

It started with him [Terry] walking around the house naked with an erection, making sure to amble past the little girl and inspire her curiosity. After doing that a couple times, Terry began to masturbate with the door open. When his niece would come to watch, Terry would tell her that what they were doing was a secret that she couldn’t tell anyone. “In my mind, I had the thought that I would never hurt her and that she would grow up trusting me,” Terry said. He says he wanted her to look up to him.

The third time Terry masturbated in front of his niece, he did it while she was in the room, and he played a pornographic movie on the TV. ‘Do you want to try what they’re doing?’ he asked her, motioning to the woman riding the man onscreen. His niece said yes, and she took off her shorts before straddling him. To avoid getting too graphic, Terry said he knew almost immediately that he was going to injure the girl if he went any further—”she was so small,” is how he puts it. ‘That’s when the reality clicked in and I grabbed her and lifted her off of me and sat her next to me on the couch,’ he says. ‘I got up and walked out of the room saying, ‘Lord, what am I doing! Lord, forgive me for what I have done!’

Yes, pedophiles are the new class of folks progressives want to mainstream in America.

He laments how hard pedophiles have it in America. Given the fact that “there’s the problem of finding homes for pedophiles who are arrested and eventually put back into communities. In Florida, where Miami-Dade County has grown increasingly restrictive about where people who commit sexual crimes can live, the department of corrections once housed a small group of pedophiles under a bridge, like real-life trolls.”

Jefferson mentions an:

ABC News article from 2003, [where] a corrections officer from Los Angeles told reporter Michael S. James that imprisoned pedophiles “usually don’t make it” without protective custody. Leslie Walker, a prisoner’s rights activist, told James, “[Child sex offenders] are at risk of being murdered, having their food taken, having their cells defecated and urinated in. Their life is truly a living hell.” Good, most people will say. But there is a growing number of researchers, many of them out of Canada, whose work suggests that pedophilia is an illness deserving of the public’s sympathy the way any brain disorder is. Some of the scientists say pedophilia is a sexual orientation, meaning that it’s unchangeable, regardless of how much jail time or beatings or therapy someone is dealt. Others have reason to believe that pedophiles are born that way, and that some of them will suffer through entire lives without hurting a single child. If this research proves to be correct, it should help shape both our public policy and our public attitude, so that we’re protecting kids while also protecting pedophiles from angry mobs, cellmates, and themselves.

We all know prison is tough. Not that it’s the most accurate representation, but does anyone remember the show OZ? But, let’s focus on the science part of this statement.

Last February, Jefferson wrote that “Dr. Vernon Quinsey, then of Queen’s University, and Dr. Hubert Van Gijseghem (pronounced HI-sheh-hem), who was retired from the University of Montreal, testified before the Canadian Parliament’s ‘Committee on Justice and Human Rights.’ The topic of the day was mandatory minimum sentences for people convicted of sexual offenses against children….Dr. Van Gijseghem, stood out:

[I]t is a fact that real pedophiles account for only 20 percent of sexual abusers. If we know that pedophiles are not simply people who commit a small offence from time to time but rather are grappling with what is equivalent to a sexual orientation just like another individual may be grappling with heterosexuality or even homosexuality, and if we agree on the fact that true pedophiles have an exclusive preference for children, which is the same as having a sexual orientation, everyone knows that there is no such thing as real therapy. You cannot change this person’s sexual orientation.

[...]

Dr. James Cantor is the Head of Research in the Sexual Behaviours Clinic at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Canada’s largest mental health and teaching hospital….he’s been working on better understanding pedophiles for about 12 years now using a variety of methods. In the Kurt Freund Phallometric Lab, Cantor and his colleagues can attach an instrument to sex offenders’ penises in order to gauge their responses to a variety of sexually charged images. The Freund lab, Cantor tells me during a phone call last week, is one of the few in the world that can measure increases in penis volume rather than just increases in circumference.

Does this sound like the kind of research you want funded by your taxpayer dollars?

Cantor’s work also focuses on running sex offenders through what he calls ‘a battery of neuropsychological exams,’ and brain scans on top of that, thus providing one of science’s most well-rounded looks at how a pedophile is made. That there are a lot of unanswered questions in Cantor’s field of research can’t be overstated, but his initial findings are noteworthy.

I’ll let you determine the findings on your own – if you wish to read the whole piece – but it’s all interwoven into a narrative that trivializes child rape. The most egregious paragraph prefaces the scientific studies with Jefferson writing “imagine a world in which admitting your attraction to busty women or tall men led to alienation, jail time, or your murder. Older gay men can probably remember such an era, but nowadays most sexual appetites have been mainstreamed to the point of banality. Pedophiles, for obvious reasons, don’t enjoy the same kind of tolerance, and thus it seems as if they may be locked forever in a sexual prison from the moment they’re born.”

Sexual appetites involving children should be mainstreamed? In addition, the keywords in the first sentence are “men” and “women” – not “boys” and “girls.”

Of course, Jefferson had to go to Canada to contrast our societies. Canada being filled with awesome scientific Canucks, while America is dominated by mean and nasty folks who are intolerant of people attracted to prepubescent children and want to have sex with them. It’s a disproportionate response – for a liberal.

He uses Jerry Sandusky as an example to convey that point.

When Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky was arrested last year and charged with 52 counts of molesting young boys, America’s universal hatred for pedophiles was once again put on prominent display. A society is defined by what it despises as much as what it loves, and though the United States has a history of a great many scorned communities, none is as broadly reviled as men who have sex with children.

How should have we reacted? What would have been the appropriate response? A box of chocolates? Not to mention, that Sandusky’s rapes went deeper – it permeated the entire Penn State administration who felt that Joe Pa, the program, and the school would be better to just ignore or take de minimis actions to remedy the problem.

However, some nations, like Germany and Canada, aren’t taking de minimis actions to help pedophiles. They have call centers for these people.

…in Germany there is Prevention Project Dunkelfeld, an organization that, like a suicide hotline, offers free counseling to anyone struggling with thoughts of molesting a child. “Dunkelfeld” translates to ‘dark field,’ and PPD’s founders say their goal is to make sure pedophiles come out of the shadows and get the help they need before they offend. A sample PPD tagline is representative of the kind of sympathy with which it approaches the problem: “You are not guilty because of your sexual desire, but you are responsible for your sexual behavior. There is help.”

Canada, too, has Circles of Support and Accountability, an association of volunteers who are advised by professionals on how to help convicted sex offenders reacclimate to society. While some COSA programs are beginning to pop up around the States, we have not nearly as many as our northern neighbors, who originally concocted the COSA model.

However, what is preventing “America’s progress [in the realm of pedophile tolerance] are our ‘mandatory report’ laws, some of which say that therapists are required to contact authorities if they have even a “reasonable suspicion” that a child is being mistreated somewhere.” Jefferson uses “California’s mandatory report policy [as an example, which ] says very openly that ‘no evidence or proof is required prior to making a report’ [PDF], making it perfectly acceptable to call the cops on a person solely for talking about sexual fantasies regarding children. Naturally, to avoid this alarmist scrutiny, most pedophiles sit silently on their secret desires, which is at best unhealthy for them, and at worst dangerous for children.”

In this effort to curb possible threats to children – not to mention very awkward dinner conversations – it maybe detrimental to pedophile tolerance since it will drives them underground. Yet, to the progressive mind, “if we can get pedophiles to begin acknowledging their dangerous desires, experts like Dawn Horwitz-Person, a psychotherapist in Chico, California, who specializes in treating sex offenders, believes we can help pedophiles “learn how to manage their desires the way alcoholics do.” So, when does Pedophilia = alcoholism?

Granted, I’ve written some explosive and admittedly inappropriate pieces in the past, but this is something on an entirely different level. To say that pedophiles are a new class of discriminated citizens that deserve our sympathy, is flat out wrong. They are rightfully vilified because no rational individual thinks that sexual relations with raping children is an appropriate form of social interaction. Call me crazy, but pedophilia isn’t the same as alcoholism because the level of damage inflicted on yourself and others isn’t commensurate to raping a child.

Gawker has taken progressivism to a new dangerous and pernicious level.

Blowback

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THANK YOU for writing about this…I stumbled upon this and could barely finish reading…absolutely obscene piece. And the repugnant commenters who thanked him for writing such a brave article had me fuming. Just amazing that anyone could even try to explain pedophelia.

THANK YOU for writing about this…I stumbled upon this and could barely finish reading…absolutely obscene piece. And the repugnant commenters who thanked him for writing such a brave article had me fuming. Just amazing that anyone could even try to explain pedophelia.

ellifint on September 9, 2012 at 10:01 PM

I think that was the worst part for me(beside the actual description of the rape itself). The commenters congratulating him was horrile. Oh and I especially thought his use of “sex” was heinous. If you are molesting a seven year old; it isn’t sex-it’s rape.

The old adage is that the true mark of a society is how it treats the weakest in its ranks. Blacks, women, Latinos, gays and lesbians, and others are still in no way on wholly equal footing in America. But they’re also not nearly as lowly and cursed as men attracted to children. One imagines that if Jesus ever came to Earth, he’d embrace the poor, the blind, the lepers, and, yes, the pedophiles. As a self-professed “progressive,” when I think of the world I’d like to live in, I like to imagine that one day I’d be OK with a man like Terry moving next door to me and my children.</em> I like to think that I could welcome him in for dinner, break bread with him, and offer him the same blessings he’s offered me time and again. And what hurts to admit, even knowing all I know now, is that I’m not positive I could do that.

Disgusting but unsurprising. To the left, sexual promiscuity of any kind, even as horrific as this, is to be “tolerated,” and eventually encouraged. They seek to undermine our culture and values in order to remove an obstacle to their own plans.

The old adage is that the true mark of a society is how it treats the weakest in its ranks. Blacks, women, Latinos, gays and lesbians, and others are still in no way on wholly equal footing in America. But they’re also not nearly as lowly and cursed as men attracted to children. One imagines that if Jesus ever came to Earth, he’d embrace the poor, the blind, the lepers, and, yes, the pedophiles. As a self-professed “progressive,” when I think of the world I’d like to live in, I like to imagine that one day I’d be OK with a man like Terry moving next door to me and my children. I like to think that I could welcome him in for dinner, break bread with him, and offer him the same blessings he’s offered me time and again. And what hurts to admit, even knowing all I know now, is that I’m not positive I could do that.

I swear that I almost trashed my monitor reading this. Absolutely despicable.

I think this article brings forward the truth about sexual orientation — it is mental. Currently we are putting up with certain deviances as OK — same sex relationships. But as the article points out, just like pedophilia, they are mental problems– they are not normal!! People who have these problems need to recognize they are not normal but slightly different. They have a mental problem not a lot different than dyslexia or chronic depression.

In an earlier age, people realized these feelings were abnormal and didn’t act on them and either lead solitary lives or enjoyed marriage somewhat less normal people. We need to go back to recognizing homosexual folks have a minor mental problem and they need to deal with it as a disability not as a different version of normal.

In an earlier age, people realized these feelings were abnormal and didn’t act on them and either lead solitary lives or enjoyed marriage somewhat less normal people. We need to go back to recognizing homosexual folks have a minor mental problem and they need to deal with it as a disability not as a different version of normal.

KenInIL on September 10, 2012 at 4:57 AM

Good luck getting that genie back in the bottle. At this point it’ll take a massive epidemic, nuclear war, Day-After-Tomorrow-sized natural disaster or some other major life-changing event for a shift back to old-time morality to happen.

There’s a key difference between homosexuality and pedophilia: age of consent. There’s a certain point where we have to be confident that human beings can make mature judgments about their sexuality, and the age of consent has coalesced around the average age that we’ve generally determined the maturity point was. Once that age is reached, that person is now considered a consenting adult.

And as long as they can conduct themselves in a civilized manner, and exercise their sexuality responsibly (i.e. don’t do the nasty on a public sidewalk) with other consenting adults, they should not be penalized for any deviancy from the normal sexual relationship. Pedophilia doesn’t qualify for that, since at least one of the parties involved hasn’t reached that age of consent yet.

This is what the Obama Administration is all about,after all they are going to “fundamentally transform America”.Look for a new “Civil Rights Movement” coming down the pike should this turd get re-elected.Sick Ba$trds.

This is the first step to normalizing this aberrant behavior. It’s why they pushed the “they’re born that way” meme so hard for homosexuality – if you can’t do anything about it, then you can’t be blamed.

The fact is that homosexuality and pedophilia are both perversions. As TMOverbeck says, the difference is one of the parties being legally (and mentally) unable to consent. In either case, however, society should not be pushed to accept a perversion as normal. And, certainly not to celebrate it.

Some murderers are born that way, too – just broke in the head. I’m willing to bet that the answer from most of these people would be “But, that’s different!” It isn’t really. It’s the issue of an aberrant behavior that is “uncontrollable” – the only difference being that no one has tried to normalize murder, yet.

I want harsher penalties for crimes against children. I cannot believe anyone thinks we should give sympathy to animals like Terry. Terry molested his own neice. What about the child’s whose life was ruined because Terry is a perv. The society I want to live in condemns people who hurt children. The death penalty springs to mind. I don’t care if the were born that way. Jeffrey Dahmer was born that way. Disgusting.

Disgusting but unsurprising. To the left, sexual promiscuity of any kind, even as horrific as this, is to be “tolerated,” and eventually encouraged. They seek to undermine our culture and values in order to remove an obstacle to their own plans.

Mr. Prodigy on September 9, 2012 at 11:37 PM

Robert Stacy McCain wrote a good article about this and how the left uses rights as a means to push anything:

“Seizing on the triumphant narrative of the black civil-rights movement, liberals adopted the habit of framing political debates in terms of minority ‘rights’ versus majority ‘discrimination.’ . . . To disagree with a liberal, to oppose his latest policy proposal, is to invite comparisons to Bull Connor and Orval Faubus, so long as the liberal can make ‘rights’ the basis of his argument.
” ‘Rights talk’ allowed liberals a means of preemptively delegitimizing their opponents and thereby to avoid arguing about policy in terms of necessity, utility and efficacy. If all legal and political conflicts are about ‘rights,’ there is no need to argue about the specific consequences of laws and policies. Merely determine which side of the controversy represents ‘rights’ and the debate ends there.”

Some murderers are born that way, too – just broke in the head. I’m willing to bet that the answer from most of these people would be “But, that’s different!” It isn’t really. It’s the issue of an aberrant behavior that is “uncontrollable” – the only difference being that no one has tried to normalize murder, yet.

GWB on September 10, 2012 at 9:17 AM

Well, there IS a difference… the murderer wishes to take the life of another person against their will. No murder victim is consenting to having their life ended. If two people consent to using certain body parts together in an unconventional manner, that’s not harming anyone else (unless STD’s are involved, then it’s the partners’ responsibility to get tested and be honest with other potential partners about their health).

My daughter (who is a lesbian) said that the final straw for her was the day that the LGBT group at her college was talking about adding even more “letters” to the alphabet soup of the LGBT acronym, and they wanted to add pedophiles to their list, “They’re oppressed, too”.

She looked at them all in amazement, and said, “They rape CHILDREN. You think people are going to take us seriously if we add CRIMINALS to our “group”? What they do is WRONG.”

When some of the people in the meeting started arguing with her, she realized that this wasn’t about what was “right” with them, it was about being victims.

the only difference being that no one has tried to normalize murder, yet.

GWB on September 10, 2012 at 9:17 AM

Oh, but they have. It’s called abortion, and many are now embracing, euthanasia, ie ‘mercy killing’ as well. And so we end up here, just as we were warned in Romans 1. For this cause, He delivered them up….

Many of us have known that this was the next step in the destruction of sexual morality. I’m starting to understand how Lot felt and it is awful. I shudder to think how horrible things are going to get. So what are the odds on God striking us down or apologizing to Sodom?

It kinda makes sense to me though that once they start focusing on being “born that way” that eventually we’d start getting to the more taboo sexual preferences. Still, you’d think they’d add the people who have sex with buildings and cars first before going for people who actually harm others.

My daughter (who is a lesbian) said that the final straw for her was the day that the LGBT group at her college was talking about adding even more “letters” to the alphabet soup of the LGBT acronym…

TeresainFortWorth on September 10, 2012 at 10:38 AM

The only letter that should be added to that abbreviation is “A” for “asexual,” though that sometimes meets opposition. Sadly, to some, not being interested in sex is a far bigger problem than being sexually attracted to children.

Seriously did no one see this coming? Didn’t anyone read Breightbart’s reporting on Kevin Jennings, Obama’s “safe school czar”?
This is all he was about! And during the “ones” second term we will be labeled the problem. We will be the haters.
That’s why long prison sentences are so appropriate for members of this administration. And I think they know its possible once everyone wakes up to them.
The goal of the progressive is like Kony of Uganda, once they’ve got the children they have the future. And they’ll incite mayhem against America with every word so that no one stops to notice their attrocities.
Gawker is a fluff piece compared to the hearts of Hillary (“It take a village” was newspeak for “it takes the state”) or Barack.
Tell your children and grand children who these people really are. Prepare them.

In nature, most male mammals NEVER get a chance to breed. They live their lives (or at least the breeding season of their species) in a state of sexual frustration because larger, stronger males, or even the females themselves, forbid or refuse them.

We humans do everything we can to deny that we are mammals at all, from sexualizing the mammary glands, to removing the protective covering of the male reproductive organ, to expecting our females to remove hair and appear pre-pubescent, to deliberately destroying our own offspring in the name of self-actualization/empowerment/whatever, to glorifying every expression of sexuality *except* that of reproduction. And, we also seem to believe that *every* male has the right to breed, with benefits for those who do not reproduce, and that those who are denied are being grievously wronged at some fundamental level.

I don’t care if its leqal you’ve got to stop the meds! chotii is there nothing else shiny nearby? We’ve enough isms self-actualizing to justify tree humping to save the planet (if not the bulk of the solar system).
Just stay away from children okay?

Your’s is the very psychobabble that brings justification enbabling these monsters. If you weren’t aware of it, this is very serious, be aware of it. If you were aware of it, you’re on notice, we know that you are the problem.
There is a power beyond primal which you seem oblivious to. Maybe it is drugs. Or maybe its your parents drug use. Or hell maybe you’re just wasting a liberal arts degree, but while your grasping at some form of philosophy there is a concerted effort, known, documented, to feed off of our children.
Gawker just blurbed out a little about it to see if anyone’s paying attention.
This opa’s paying attention. AND I WILL NOT BE MOVED.

If we are all just chemicals, none of us can “help” anything we do in any absolute sense.

Progressives have a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of being. It is as if they are all suffering from a mental illness that badly disconnects them from reality. Even if they are correct about the chemicals, they are still obviously completely wrong about there then being no socially identifiable choices involved.

Pedophiles know exactly what they are doing. The idea we should tolerate those choices is pure evil far worse than the pedophilia itself.

Government sanctions and rewards uncontrolled reproduction of the ‘right’ people, wingnuttis maximus. The result? 50% of the nation on welfare and growing. Entire subsections of the populace that aren’t even useful to say “would you like fries with that?”

Quit thinking Dr.Kevorkian’s ‘eugenics’ were the be-all and end-all of it. A nation that does not practice some form of ‘eugenics’ will inevitably disintegrate from floods of immigrants or turn into Idiocracy.

Like I have said about a million times, being a leftist is about the self. It’s a type of “selfless narcissism”.
He’d be willing to endanger his children all so he can feel good about himself. Liberalism IS A MENTAL ILLNESS.

My daughter (who is a lesbian) said that the final straw for her was the day that the LGBT group at her college was talking about adding even more “letters” to the alphabet soup of the LGBT acronym…
TeresainFortWorth on September 10, 2012 at 10:38 AM

The only letter that should be added to that abbreviation is “A” for “asexual,” though that sometimes meets opposition.
bmmg39 on September 10, 2012 at 12:23 PM

The letters “BLT” in this victim group’s acronym always makes me giggle. Git yerself into the kitchen and make mine with mayo, woman!

Pedophilia is the worst curse on any society. It’s common in the Mid-East and I honestly believe it has a lot to do with the cognizant disconnect that has permeated those countries—why 16th Century thinking is OK in the 21st Century.

The article is sickening. I remember the psychological association here in the US were taking this same tact. Perhaps, for the sake of our children, the pedophiles will all move to the forward thinking countries like Canada and Germany.